New fiscal sponsorship agreement with NumFocus foundation

I’m very pleased to announce that rOpenSci has signed a comprehensive fiscal sponsorship agreement with the NumFocus foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit that supports R&D for open source scientific software projects. We are delighted to be in the company of esteemed projects such as IPython and Julia that share our goal of promoting reproducible research practices across many scientific communities and developing a rich ecosystem of tools for open scientific computing.

All of our activities, from hackathons and the ambassador program to salaries for our full-time personnel, are 100% grant supported at this time. While we will continue to pursue all possible federal and private funding to support future efforts, our continued success necessitates a diverse funding model. Given the current funding climate additional donations from individuals, institutions, and corporations are critical to help us remain sustainable and give us the ability to scale.

Funds that we receive through NumFocus will go towards various community activities (hackathons, conferences, sprints), support for our community members to travel to meetings, and helping us grow our team. As more substantial funding become available, we hope to provide salary support both for short-term staff and additional full-time personnel to come on board. All of our plans for the future are visible in our Github repos, discuss-list, twitter, and this blog.

Carl Boettiger, Gavin Simpson, and I make up the financial oversight committee for all funding that we receive through NumFocus. We are particularly indebted to Leah Silen and Andy Terrel from NumFocus and Fernando Perez from IPython for helping us set up this agreement.

How to contribute

All contributions to rOpenSci from US organizations and individuals are tax deductible donations. If you would like to support our activities, we are now able to accept donations in a variety of forms including PayPal, BitCoin, or checks made out to NumFOCUS (note rOpenSci in the memo line):